Biography
Selina Shirley was born on August 24, 1707, at Astwell House, in Northamptonshire, England, the second daughter of Washington Shirley, the second Earl Ferrers, and his wife Mary Levinge. Her family was among the old nobility of England, and she grew up in a world of country houses, fine clothes and strict etiquette. As a child, she was serious and given to thought. She is said to have been struck at the age of nine by the sight of a funeral, when she stood by an open grave and was seized by the thought that she too would one day die. She asked herself what would become of her soul. The memory stayed with her. She was a girl who loved to read and who was drawn to religion, though her family was not especially devout and her upbringing was a worldly one.
In 1728, at the age of twenty, she married Theophilus Hastings, the ninth Earl of Huntingdon, a kind and easy man who preferred the country to the court. The couple settled at Donington Park, in Leicestershire. They had seven children, of whom four survived. She was a good wife and mother, and she moved in the circles of the aristocracy, as a hostess and a woman of influence. She was a person of strong will and wide interests. Her life had a settled pattern. But the religious stirrings of her childhood did not disappear, and in the 1730s she began to be moved by the example of her sister-in-law, Lady Margaret Hastings, who had been converted through the preaching of Benjamin Ingham, a friend of the Wesleys. Lady Margaret had a quiet and joyful faith, which Selina found hard to resist.
In 1739, she was struck by a grave illness. As she lay near to death, she cried out for mercy, and she said that she received a clear sense of her salvation through faith in Christ alone. She called it a great change. She recovered, and she resolved to give her life to the cause of the gospel. She joined the Methodist society at Fetter Lane, in London. She declared that she had been brought into the way of the Lord. She was a woman of rank, and she used it. She opened her house to the preachers, among them John Wesley and George Whitefield, and she invited her friends in the aristocracy to attend. She held drawing room meetings in London, to which she brought dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies. Not all were pleased. The Duchess of Buckingham wrote that it was monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. Others were moved.
Whitefield became her chief friend and counselor. In 1748, after the death of her husband, she appointed him as one of her chaplains, which gave him the standing of a peer's chaplain and allowed him to preach in the homes of the nobility. She sided with him in his dispute with Wesley over predestination, as she held to the Calvinist view. She did not break with Wesley, however, and she kept a friendly regard for him. She used her wealth to build chapels. Beginning in the 1740s, she opened chapels in Brighton, Bath, Tunbridge Wells and many other towns, which were staffed by evangelical clergy and lay preachers. She paid for their building and often for their ministers. She sold her jewels to pay for them. She is said to have spent most of her fortune on the cause.
In 1768, she founded a college at Trevecca, in Wales, to train ministers for the work of the evangelical revival. It was the first such college of the movement, and it was opened with Howell Harris as host. John Fletcher served for a time as its president but resigned in 1771 when a dispute over doctrine broke out between the Calvinists and the Arminians. The college trained a number of men who became preachers and missionaries. In 1792, after her death, it was moved to Cheshunt. She also encouraged the work of missions. She had a plan to send workers to Georgia and to the American colonies, and, in her last years, to Sierra Leone. She supported Whitefield's orphanage in Georgia.
The Church of England was uneasy about her chapels. In 1779, a court case decided that her chapels did not have the protection of the established church, and in order to protect them, she registered them as dissenting places of worship under the Toleration Act. It meant that she and her ministers were no longer within the Church of England. She had not wished it. She became the leader of a distinct body, the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, a group of churches that survives to this day. She was a leader of a sect that she had not wished to found.
She was a woman of will, who was sometimes domineering. She was jealous of her control over the chapels and her preachers, and she could be quick to take offense. She had disputes with a number of men. She was also a woman of great generosity, who gave to the poor and the sick. She suffered the loss of several of her children. Her husband died in 1746, and her sons died before her. She was ill for much of her life, but she lived to a great age. She continued to oversee the work until her last year. She died on June 17, 1791, at the age of eighty-three, in London. She is said to have said that her work was done and that she was going home. Her life shows the effect of a noblewoman who used her rank and her fortune for the gospel. She was the patron of the revival and a mother of the church.